Bright of the Sky Read online

  "It was fun." The space elevator was fun and had given her some time to prepare herself to meet the company on new terms-equal terms, as Minerva's latest partner. And to begin to put her stamp on things-starting with the proper handling of Titus Quinn.

  Dismissing the security staff, Stefan led the way in his blue jogging suit and sneakers, making Helice feel overdressed. The black fabric of her suit sparkled now and then with little computing tasks. She stranded the data from her suit into the company data tide, that omnipresent stream of data cached in data structures embedded in the walls and carried by light beams through the work environment.

  Amid his long strides, Stefan glanced at her. "He said no."

  "I know he said no. Titus will change his mind." It was essential. They needed his experience with the adjoining region, as it had been dubbed. Minerva's great hope was that the adjoining region, if it existed beyond the quantum level and if they could penetrate it-mighty ifs, no doubt-that it might be a path, plunging through the universe in a warped course, giving access to the stars. An access that might not rip apart a stellar transport like a barn in a tornado.

  Stefan said, "He likes to be called Quinn, now."

  "I heard." Why did people insist on telling her things she already knew?

  Stefan kept up a good pace, in his habit of using the Company's long corridors to stay in shape. "He ran Lamar off the property."

  "I know that," Helice said. "Even the threat about the brother ... what was his name?"

  "Bob."

  "Even that made no difference. But we'll let him stew a few days. He'll come around." When he did, when he agreed to go, Helice would go with him. Somebody had to make the business judgments. Minerva wouldn't let him go alone, Stefan had already said as much.

  The validity of the find was becoming more convincing every day. Earthside mSaps-tightly under control-confirmed the optical cube data Helice had salvaged. At irregular points in time and locale, Minerva sensors detected quantum particles that mirrored the proper quantum orientation. Shunning ordinary matter, they were devilishly hard to register. But the mSaps reasoned-with the nonchalance of machine sapience-that beyond the horizon of our universe lay another. It was incredible. And she wanted to see it for herself-wanted it with a fierce hunger that had slowly crept upon her during the three-day descent on the space elevator. She didn't know who Stefan was considering for the junket, but she had to make her pitch nownow that she had him alone.

  They power-walked through the savant warehouse, packed with technicians tending the savants and tabulators that in turn tended Minerva's data tide. Every tender aspired to administer to the mSaps, but that privilege fell only to the savvies, those who could, for example, solve complex equations on the back of a napkin, or even without a pencil at all. Like Helice herself.

  Here in the warehouse, young scientists on the make had only a few months to prove themselves. Failing in the Company, they might find a menial job-but most would opt for the dole, the guaranteed BSL, the Basic Standard of Living. Just shoot me, Helice thought, if I ever sit drooling in front of a Deep Vision screen.

  The savant warehouse led to the central warrens, where the work cubes formed a vast lattice. Stefan broke into a jog and Helice followed. The occupants barely took note of the owners passing by, intent on their data entry quotas. This was where the data cycle began, where the information strands wound onto the skeins of the nonquantum tronics forming the broad base of the computing pyramid that embodied Minerva's collective knowledge. This scene was repeated at similar company nests at Generics, EoSap, ChinaKor, and TidalSphere.

  And now Helice Maki was at the top of that pyramid. She took a moment to savor this, but the taste ran thin. The region next door towered in her imagination, casting a long shadow on the day.

  She glanced at Stefan, "Still got a fix on the emissions? Three locales, right?"

  After the destruction of the Appian II, every Minerva installation in commercial space had joined in the search for anomalous particles. They'd found them in three other locations, across several parsecs of space, now that Minerva knew what to look for, and how to look, using a next-generation program of the one Luc Diets had inadvertently set in motion.

  "One locale," Stefan answered. "Two of them dried up."

  Helice knew about the shifting coordinates. "That just reinforces my thesis. It's not merely a quantum reality. If it was, the readings would be constant. So it's a universe of greater than Planck length."

  "Right, it's bigger than that, but smaller than our universe. And it's not always in the same place." He banked around a corner and sprinted up a stairway, his face starting to redden.

  On the first landing, Stefan bent over, hands on knees. He shook his head. "Damn, but I'd like to believe all this, Helice."

  "I know you would." He'd been a worried man since the day she'd met him. She'd heard that he used to be a driving force, but these days he was afraid of risks, looking for proof before making decisions. This was not the man to lead Minerva, or manage the real estate next door.

  He puffed, catching his breath. "Hell. What makes you so cocksure?"

  "No guarantees," Helice said, "but try thinking of it this way. How come we live in a perfect universe? Ever think of that, how we just happen to live in a space-time where things are stable and tend to support life? We just happen to have the exact force of gravity, the exact force of the strong nuclear force so that things cohere rather than not. That's a lot of fine-tuning for our convenience. Religion says that God arranged it that way. Nice answer, except it kind of stops further discussion."

  Stefan unfolded from the bent-over position and leaned against a railing. She had his attention.

  "So you could say, of course the universe is finely tuned for us. If it weren't, we wouldn't be here to wonder about it. But then it leads to the idea that there must be other space-times where things aren't perfect for life. Where the fundamental particles have different values, and some universes-maybe the majority-will be cold and dark. And some, like ours, won't."

  "Right. The multiverse has some scientific logic behind it, if not scientific evidence."

  "No evidence. Until now."

  Stefan smiled. On his thin face, it looked more like a crack than a grin. "Wait until you see what we've got at the meeting."

  Frowning, Helice realized he'd kept something from her. "Tell me now, Stefan." She hated secrets. All her life she'd had a horror of people whispering, knowing things she didn't, talking behind her back. Being smart could be a curse in a world where intelligence measured your worth. Being smarter than her parents had been the worst, when they couldn't follow where she went, when she outgrew them before she'd even grown up.

  Stefan started the next flight, a little slower now.

  Helice didn't move from the landing. "Stefan."

  He turned, waiting. This was her last chance to get him on her side.

  "I'm your best thinker. Your best strategist. I'm young, in great shape. I don't have a family to hold me back. I'm new, and willing to put myself on the line to prove my worth." She wouldn't beg. But she could argue.

  He let the words settle. "And if true?"

  She didn't like the hostile tone, but she pressed on. "I want to go. With Titus. As his handler." She walked up to join him, standing finally on the same step, but he still towered over her. If he sided with her, she would be the first-along with Titus-to know what the new universe held. How could knowing mean so much? And yet it did.

  "It'll be dangerous, Helice. Titus might not come back."

  "I've said I'm willing to risk a lot."

  "Maybe I need you here."

  She forestalled a harangue by a declaration: "I won't be content to stay behind."

  He watched her with narrowed eyes, appraising her. "I'll consider it." He turned and, breath returned, ran up the steps, leaving her to follow. Leaving her with hope, though not much.

  She and Stefan arrived at the boardroom, and all faces, real and virtual, turned to th
em.

  Around a smart table sat the other partners: Dane Wellinger, Suzene Gninenko, Peter DeFanti, Sherman Pitts, Lizza Molina, and special projects manager Booth Waller. Twelve others shunted in virtually, and their chairs silvered with their images. Looking at Booth Waller, Helice stopped and touched Stefan's arm. "I thought it was just the partners."

  "Booth is on track for partnership. You knew that."

  She hadn't known. Booth was an easy man to underestimate, a mistake she wouldn't make again.

  The board members welcomed Helice with nods. She thought that one or two might even be sincere. She brought prestige to Minerva at a time when they needed it. And she'd brought them the Appian II. That was the contribution that really earned her the expedition. It was, after all, her region. She'd salvaged it from the Appian, ensuring its discovery wasn't lost to an obsessed mSap.

  Stefan said, "We've made a little progress while you were in transit." He nodded, a motion that made his face look even more like a hatchet than it normally did. He voiced the table display, and in front of each board member appeared a V-sim projection of a small circle.

  "It doesn't look like much at first," Stefan said. "Booth, take us through this thing."

  Booth rubbed his hands on his thighs and started to stand. Then, thinking better of it, remained seated. "It's not always in the same place, so we had trouble getting a lock on it. We finally got this result at the Ceres Platform," he said, referring to another K-tunnel outpost. "The physics team says we're bumping up against the membrane of another universe. Think of it like a bubble within a bubble, where reality is on the surface, or the brane. Sometimes the branes touch."

  Helice rolled her eyes. To be lectured on brane theory by this guy ...

  Booth noted her impatience and went on: "Anyway, at one of these brane interfaces we went in about nine hundred nanometers. We've consistently gotten in at least that far, proceeding a nanometer at a time, and recording the sights. We're confident we can transfer in a mass, but we're not to that point yet. We're using ultra-high-energy quantum implosions, followed by an inflation to macroscopic size." He shrugged. "If you want the gruesome details, we'll bring in the physics guys. But for now, think of it as a simulation of the big bang. But instead of creating a universe, we're punching through to one that already exists. Apparently exists."

  Helice tried to keep her voice even. "We know this, Booth."

  "Okay, then," he said, "what you're looking at is the picture so far."

  "The picture of what?"

  "The other place." Booth got the reaction he was hoping for. "I thought you'd be surprised." As the board members leaned in to squint at the display, he added, "We've been busy, as I said."

  Booth enlarged the sim until the center of the circle looked grayish, like a fried egg seen in negative. Vertical slashes appeared in the gray center. To Helice it looked like chromosomes in a nucleus. He enlarged the display again. Some of the vertical slashes were askew, or bent over. Booth pointed a wand at the display, changing angles of view, from the vector of the pointer. The scene began to look familiar, but not quite ...

  "We're not sure if the color spectrum is distorted, or how the transmission degrades through our interface."

  Helice peered at the V-sim. "Are you saying that this is a visual? Not just a graphic representation?"

  Booth coughed. "Yes. It's the adjoining region. What we've seen so far."

  Helice stared, and stared hard. They'd been talking about a mirror universe, a place, and until now-even as intriguing as those words were-it had just been talk. But here was a visual. It staggered her. The board members, silver and real, remained silent for a long while.

  Then, from down the table Suzene Gninenko asked, "So what exactly are we looking at?"

  Stefan made a sweeping gesture at Booth. "And the answer is?"

  Booth's voice squeaked as he said, "Well, actually, our best guess is ... that it's grass."

  It could not have been a more remarkable utterance if Booth had claimed to see angels dancing on the head of a pin.

  The board members exchanged glances. Suzene Gninenko peered at the V-sim like she'd never seen a blade of grass before.

  "Grass," Helice said. Now that the suggestion was planted, the picture did look like blades of grass.

  Face beaming, Stefan looked at Helice. "Apparently the universe next door is not dark, barren, or chaotic. It has an atmosphere. It possesses life."

  "The blades aren't green," Helice murmured, still strangely moved by the presence of those brave shoots of grass.

  "We don't know what light is falling on it, or what the photosynthesis analog might be. Chlorophyll isn't the only option."

  "What are the chances that grass would look so similar-over there?" She controlled her elation with difficulty. She had believed in it before anyone else. It shouldn't come as such a surprise. But the implications of grass, of life, were almost beyond comprehension-as few things were to Helice Maki.

  Stefan smiled, enjoying her reaction. "Maybe God plays in more than one realm."

  Along with every other member of the board, Helice stared at the bentover blades of grass. She murmured, "Yes, but which god?"

  She intended to find out.

  CIIJPTEIt FOR

  HEY CALLED SUCH THINGS OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES. From Quinn's research, he knew them to be illusions. An OBE was the impression of being detached from one's body and seeing it from above, now proved-to the scientifically minded, at least-to be the result of body-related processing in the medial temporal lobe of the brain.

  His body was giving him such an illusion now.

  He lay on his couch, having fallen asleep there well after midnight, and now awoke to the OBE. A man stood below him, standing on the edge of a platform, looking down. By scrunching forward a bit, Quinn could look over the mans shoulder. His stomach convulsed at the sight of the thirty-thousand-foot plunge to the planet below. Beyond the man's shoulders and fluttering hair, Quinn could see a vast ocean, a gaping maw into which the man might step at any moment. The man was thinking of jumping; the ocean beckoned with silvery indifference.

  It was always the same OBE. Quinn knew the next thing he would do was look up. He fought this inclination.

  The man below him was himself. Neither of them spoke, by mutual consent or by the rules and vows of this illusory place.

  Then he did look up. There, in all its wrongful horror, stretched a river of fire as broad as the world. It must not be there. It must not be silent and stable. But it was. It had eaten the Sun. It was the Sun.

  Quinn turned away, facing down-almost as bad. He descended, becoming one with the man standing on the platform. No longer the superior, knowing, separate mind, he now had truly become Titus Quinn, indivisible. And he so wished not to be.

  The scene faded, as it always did, leaving him feeling light-headed and disturbed. Was this the phenomenon known as OBE, or had he actually been dreaming? Of far more interest: was this a memory? Two years ago he'd known the answer. He'd been someplace, a place that had kept him a long time. He had snippets of memory that amounted to little more than dreamscape images. He didn't know what happened to his wife and daughter. For a few months after he had regained consciousness on Lyra, a settled planet on the rim of known space, he had strongly believed that he'd been in an alternate world. Gradually he'd come to doubt his experience, his shattered memories, though there was no explanation for how he had come to be on Lyra. Ignoring his claims, Minerva treated him like a disoriented survivor of a terrible event, the ship's explosion and the death of its passengers and crew.

  Thus it was of the utmost importance whether the vision of the man on the platform between bright ocean and flaming sky was a memory or not. Because if it was a memory, then that was the other place.

  He heard noises outside. In an instant he realized it was what had kicked him out of his dream. There were sounds outside, in the yard.

  Now fully awake, he sat up, throwing off the coverlet. From the next room, th
rough the kitchen window, he spied one of his defensive lights strobing. Another light caught his eye through the window near the dining room hutch. His feet found his shoes in the dark, a knack carried over from the old days when he had often been summoned to the flight deck in the middle of a sleep shift. He was instantly awake, also a carryover, all senses on alert. As he passed the laser gun propped up against the bookcase, he grabbed it and made for the back door, already fully dressed, having fallen asleep that way.

  Outside, the fog dumped a load of moisture onto his warm body, quickly leveling the heat gradient between him and the Pacific Northwest air. He crouched near the door and listened. It was Christmas Eve. A soggy, dangerous one.

  The cedar trees dripped rain from limb to limb, a patter so light it might have been the background radiation of the universe. A drift of lavender smoke slid through the woods, like the cremated remains of unwanted visitors. Quinn waited for them to reveal their positions.

  It was easier to trespass in a soggy wood than a dry one, since every fallen stick was likely rotted and willing to bend rather than snap. But that very fact would lead people to move too quickly, and sooner or later, Quinn would hear them. A spike of noise off to the left, a chuffing of breath, or the soft scrape of cedar fingers against a wool cap ... Quinn rose and, avoiding the squeaky middle plank of the deck, crept down the stairs into the woods.

  His falling-down cottage by the sea held little worth stealing. Most of what he had, he'd be happy to give any truly needy burglar. But he would die to protect his trains. He'd spent two years of his life assembling the most intricate standard-gauge model railroad in the history of the bungalow hobbyist. The fact that it was probably worth almost $400,000 was not the point. It was the care with which he had hand-selected every piece, maintained the precious antique system with the sweat of his brow, and the fact that his house without it would be intolerably empty. The idea that someone would break in and summarily dump his Lionel 381 Olympian into a duffel bag filled him with a simmering resentment. He'd show them, by God. Clutching his shotgun, with the dual modes of paint spray and hot laser stream, he crept forward, swiveling his head, listening.